The Playlist: Kendrick Lamar Backs Up His Boasts

Kendrick Lamar's new song, "The Heart Part 4," may be a teaser.CreditJack Plunkett/Invision, via Associated Press

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos — and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. You can listen to this playlist on Spotify here. Like this Playlist? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com, and sign up for our Louder newsletter here.

Kendrick Lamar, ‘The Heart Part 4’

“The Heart Part 4,” Kendrick Lamar’s first new solo track in a year, may well be the teaser for an imminent new album; “Y’all got till April 7,” it concludes. It’s also a barrage of ideas, a mixtape packed into a five-minute song. Each verse gets a different instrumental track, and within verses, the flow changes again and again: slow and fast, long lines and punchy short ones, vehement sincerity and cutting sarcasm. Topping one long speedup, Mr. Lamar tries various lines, decides they’re not good enough and the sound of crumpled paper is heard. Most of the song is a boast about his success, ambition, authenticity, leadership and greatness: “30 millions later, my future favors the hip-hop status of a legendary rhyme savior.” But he also has thoughts about the election, Russia and prison brutality. And he is ungenerous about his peers, in a verse that recalls his “Control (remix)” takedown of 2013, but without the names: “Dropped one classic, came right back/’nother classic, right back/My next album, the whole industry on the ice pack.” Densely packed but hurtling forward, “The Heart Part 4” is the rare hip-hop boast that proves itself along the way. JON PARELES

Gorillaz, ‘Saturnz Barz (Spirit House)’

The rollout of “Humanz,” the first Gorillaz album since 2010, starts with a tech flourish: standard and interactive 360-degree versions of the video for “Saturnz Barz (Spirit House).” Gorillaz — the musician Damon Albarn and the animator Jamie Hewlett — place their cartoon-character band in a monster-infested house and then, suddenly, out in space amid the asteroids; there’s also a singing pizza slice. But the song is on familiar ground: the mournful, minor-key spaghetti-western-tinged sway that gave Gorillaz the international hit “Clint Eastwood.” Like other Gorillaz songs, “Saturnz Barz” contrasts a brash guest — here, the Jamaican dance-hall singer and toaster Popcaan — with Mr. Albarn’s very English glumness. In thick patois, Popcaan moves from poverty to prosperity before Albarn, in a grainy croon, muses, “With the holographs beside me/I’ll dance alone tonight/In a mirrored world, are you beside me?” It doesn’t add up, but the mood lingers. Sketching the album’s variety, the video also has snippets of three other songs, including Vince Staples’s caustic rap in “Ascension.” J.P.

Thelonious Monk, ‘Rhythm-a-Ning’

Thelonious Monk was in the midst of a creative resurgence in the summer of 1959, but he was going through personal tribulations as well. Indeed, an abiding melancholy hangs about the soundtrack he recorded that July for “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” a risqué film by the infamous French director Roger Vadim. The soundtrack will be released as its own album next month for the first time, with the publication of “Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960,” a two-disc set. None of these tunes will be unfamiliar to fans of Monk, and the renditions are not radical. But there’s a tender intimacy to these solo and quartet recordings, which were made in the company of his wife and close friends. This version of “Rhythm-a-Ning,” the friskiest tune on the album, is Track 1. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Chuck Berry, ‘Big Boys’

The “Johnny B. Goode” guitar lick gets one more workout on “Big Boys,” the first song from Chuck Berry’s final studio album, which he announced last year on his 90th birthday. It’s about growing up, “looking for joy,” being left out and then, finally, getting initiated. “When I found where, what, when and why/I didn’t let a single week pass by/till the school dance when I first met you/and I learned how to party like the big boys do.” It’s not as revelatory as his 1950s classics, but the spirit was still there: “The girls wanna stay and the boys wanna play/So let’s rock and roll till the break of day!” J.P.

David Guetta feat. Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne, ‘Light My Body Up’

By this point in 2017, the surest path to fatigue is the most hi-energy one: a dance music producer collaboration with a rapper. They’ve become ubiquitous, and largely trite, rarely showcasing the best of either participant. Perhaps “Light My Body Up” — by the French producer David Guetta, with a lot of Nicki Minaj and a little Lil Wayne — is a warning shot, or a course correction, or a happy accident. Whichever the case, soak in its bubbly and slithering Missy Elliott-throwback production. And note how Ms. Minaj sounds as comfortable as ever shifting between snide rapping, restrained singing, light patois and more. Her only competition is herself. JON CARAMANICA

James Blake, ‘My Willing Heart’

James Blake’s “My Willing Heart,” from the album he released last year,is one of his glacial, questioning ballads: “When I see my willing heart, how will I know?” It’s an elaborately tentative construction of drums, keyboards, phantom orchestration and vocals wafting in all around, incantatory without exact repetition. That undulating motion has now been matched to a black-and-white video featuring a very pregnant Natalie Portman, a few days before she gave birth to a daughter, contemplating her belly in a bedroom and slowly swimming, often floating, in dramatically lighted underwater shots. Birth, it suggests, will also be a kind of love at first sight. J.P.

Chris Jeday feat. J Balvin, Ozuna and Arcángel, ‘Ahora Dice’

“Ahora Dice” is a luminously smooth and alluringly tender collaboration from some of the biggest stars in Latin music. The production is aquatic, caressing, and in moments verges on ambient. Mr. Jeday is a successful producer of reggaeton and Latin pop, and this song nails the strengths of its vocalists, all of whom toggle between singing and rapping: J Balvin, tender and coy; Ozuna, a little tough; and Arcángel, with an almost sanctified calm. J.C.

Jessi Colter, ‘Psalm 23’

Imagine a pious Patti Smith. That’s the tone of Jessi Colter’s album “Psalms,” produced by Lenny Kaye, the Patti Smith Group’s guitarist. Mr. Kaye, who is also a music historian, was working with Ms. Colter on a book about her late husband, Waylon Jennings, when he heard her sit down at the piano and sing biblical psalms with her own melodies. He decided to record them, joining her on electric guitar and sometimes adding a drummer or another instrument. The YouTube videos are live ones like “Psalm 23,” the one that promises, “The Lord” — which she sings as “Yahweh” — “is my shepherd,” but for Ms. Colter the core is “I dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” It feels like a private devotion gone unexpectedly public. J.P.

Kelly Lee Owens, ‘Anxi’

The Welsh songwriter, singer and electronica producer Kelly Lee Owens sounds ethereal and jittery at the same time — not an easy thing — in “Anxi,” from her self-titled new album. Her sounds are the rounded, rubbery boops and pings of techno, ricocheting all around; a steady but understated beat carries the song into a complete transformation halfway through. Ms. Owens and her guest Jenny Hval sing and speak, amid dreamy echoes, about time passing and “the narrative of reality”; the video clip shows a cartoon figure on the run, sometimes on a treadmill. It’s an approachable conundrum. J.P.

Blondie, ‘Long Time’

It is a dream to live long enough to have your children support you in your old age. Look at Blondie, which has a forthcoming album, “Pollinator,” that features collaborations with a whole host of offspring: Charli XCX, TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, Sia, the Strokes’ Nick Valensi, and Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, who wrote “Long Time.” There are flickers of the early Blondie hit “Heart of Glass” here — the driving, distorted guitars, the quickstep drums. Debbie Harry doesn’t sound dissolute as she once did — instead she’s a little tentative. She may have invented the sound, but it’s not hers anymore. J.C.

Jon Pareles has been The Times's chief pop music critic since 1988. A musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University. @JonPareles

Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and the host of the Popcast. He also writes the men's Critical Shopper column for Styles. He previously worked for Vibe magazine, and has written for the Village Voice, Spin, XXL and more. @joncaramanica